The bag tightened around his neck as he grappled with it. Words flew like bullets through his brain as he thrashed, but none would come out of his mouth with his windpipe cut off.

Pranksters? he thought.

One wheel of his chair hit an obstacle along the alleyway and he tipped perilously to the side. Abandoning his efforts with the bag, he clung on.

Neo-Nazis?

There had been an upsurge in the far right’s outspokenness. Only two weeks earlier someone had shoved a leaflet under his door, disconcertingly professionally designed and printed, that suggested ancient Ugly Laws should be resurrected. Not so ancient in the USA, where the last of those laws had only been repealed officially in the 1970s. Unbidden, the wording came back to him as his chair righted itself and banged, hard, back onto solid ground.

‘Any person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or deformed in any way as to be an unsightly or disgusting object …’ was forbidden to expose themselves to public view. When he’d picked up the brochure, he’d assumed it had been broadly distributed and only ended up in his possession by chance. Now, it seemed more likely that he was the subject of a deliberate targeting, and that the pamphlet had been the precursor to the treatment he was currently receiving.

Mistaken identity?

He clung to that. Perhaps it was all a mistake. He wasn’t the only one on the wheelchair basketball team, and at least three of them were former military. Those men had enemies in several quarters. What would they do to him if he couldn’t convince his attacker that he had the wrong man? Kneecapping? Beheading? Immolation?

‘You fucker!’ Xavier recognised his teammate Danny’s Geordie accent.

The bag around his neck flapped loose and he wrenched it off, gulping air and spinning round.

Danny wheeled his chair towards them at speed and threw a hammer fist punch at the chest of a man who was still grappling to take control of Xavier’s wheelchair. The blow landed, but its force was softened as the man took a half step back. Xavier took his sports bag by the handles, whirled it over his head and into the man’s face, buying Danny time to wheel in closer and line up a further punch.

His attacker was unmoved. The sports bag fell to the floor.

Xavier did his best to scream for help, but all that came was a hoarse rumble.

‘Get the fuck out of here, X,’ Danny said. ‘I’ll deal with this bastard.’